Death Can’t End Enduring Bond

When Dexter Derel Rideout was a small boy, he had only his mother to lean on. She was raising him alone in South Los Angeles, where she tried to fend off harm by keeping him inside.

She wanted her baby safe, but she also wanted him to dream. “I wanted Dex to be exposed to the good things in life,” Lovel Abram said. “I wanted him to stand up and be somebody.”

So when Dexter was 8, Abram, who had traveled as a young woman to Los Angeles from Homer, La., got her only child a Big Brother.

Tom Riley was in his 20s, fresh out of Notre Dame, where he had played football. Raised in Pasadena, he was 6 foot 6, burly and blond. The first day he turned up at the gate of the little house at 50th Street and Vermont Avenue, he turned some heads. But from the moment he swung Dexter onto his broad shoulder and took him on his first trip downtown, he never turned his back on the boy.

Riley had signed on to be Dexter’s Big Brother for a year. But the year stretched into more than a decade. Dexter graduated from high school and went on to trade school to be an auto mechanic. Riley, an entrepreneur and political fundraiser, married and had children of his own.

Then the pair’s relationship abruptly ended.

It happened about 11 a.m. Sunday, July 20, 2003. Dexter was shot to death a block from his home. He was 19. The case remains unsolved.

Soon after he stopped crying, after he promised a reward for information about the shooting, Riley vowed to find a way to make Dexter’s death count for something.

Today, 18 months later, he and Abram will join Big Brothers Big Sisters of Greater Los Angeles and the Inland Empire at a luncheon to launch the Dexter Fund, a major effort aimed at bringing many more mentors into South Los Angeles, where the need is great.

This year, Big Brothers Big Sisters has about 200 Big Brothers and Big Sisters in Dexter’s part of town. But at least as many South Los Angeles children await mentors, said the organization’s president, John Kobara, who was a Big Brother for more than a decade.

Donations will help, Kobara said. The fund, which recently won a $101,000 grant from the S. Mark Taper Foundation, will pay for someone to recruit Big Brothers and Big Sisters and for the additional staff necessary to support them.

The hope is to woo more volunteers through major downtown companies, whose employees are ideally located to visit South Los Angeles children easily.

Over the years, Riley said, he and Dexter got so close that they could talk about anything. Dexter came to him with questions about sex and about drugs. He talked to him about violence and about the gangs in his neighborhood. When he was 10, he drew a picture of a drive-by shooting, and they talked about that too. For Dexter, it was just part of life as he knew it, Riley said.

The big moments, when they had their big talks, flowed naturally out of their many small moments, when they just spent time together, he said.

Being a Big Brother or Big Sister sounds daunting, Riley says. People often tell him they wouldn’t know what to do or say.

“But it’s just like you and I sitting here,” he said. “You just hang out or watch a little TV or read books together or go play some games. It’s just about being with somebody.”

In the early days, he said, sometimes he and Dexter just went to Home Depot or ran Riley’s errands. After a while, though, they became each other’s family and they did much more together.

Riley took Dexter to family celebrations. He took him on family trips to Lake Havasu. He took him to Dodger games. He taught him to swim and to ride a horse. He once brought him on a business trip to Rock Springs, Wyo. And when he started courting his future wife, Forbes, Riley even took the little boy along on his dates.

“Well, my commitment was to spend a day with Dexter, and you and I, we only had X amount of time on the weekends too. So I figured, ‘All right, I’ve got to couple this up,’ ” Tom Riley said to his wife as they reminisced on a recent morning in the Van Nuys home where they are raising 2-year-old twins.

“From the time I met you, Dexter was just a given,” Forbes replied, laughing. “And on the dates, it had to be pizza because Dexter was a pizza guy.”

Dexter’s mother, Forbes Riley said, had raised her son so well. He dressed perfectly, all starched and pressed. He had perfect manners, too, she said, smiling.

“The way Dexter treated me, it was with reverence,” she said, her voice cracking. Moments later, she was weeping too much to say more.

When the Rileys married, Dexter was a groomsman, standing proudly in his tuxedo beside the couple. The other groomsmen were the two brothers who share Tom’s last name.

After Dexter’s death, Tom Riley stood in his little brother’s bedroom, he said.

“There were only three pictures on his wall. There was a picture of Jesus. There was a picture of us on our wedding day and there was a picture of our babies.”

If his central role in Dexter’s life was a revelation to him, it never was to Abram, now 67, who moved after her son’s death to a new apartment.

In the living room of her immaculate home, where she lives by herself, an enormous ivory-colored Bible sits on the coffee table. On the walls of her hallway are dozens of photos -- of Dexter and also of Tom Riley.

“He was so good to my baby,” she said of Riley. “He was always so good to him. He was his friend, his everything. If it hadn’t been for Tom, then Dex wouldn’t have known the things he knew. He wouldn’t have gone the places he went. He wouldn’t have lived as much life as he lived.”